Читать книгу Syntax - Andrew Carnie - Страница 34

Look carefully at the distributions of adjectives and adverbs. There is a great deal of overlap between them. Adverbs typically take -ly; however, there are a number of clear adjectives that take this suffix too (e.g., the friendly cub). Both Adj and Adv can be modified by the word very, and they both have the same basic function in the grammar – to attribute properties to the items they modify. In fact, the only major distinction between them is syntactic: Adjectives appear inside NPs, while adverbs appear elsewhere. This kind of phenomenon is called complementary distribution. (Where you get an adjective vs. an adverb is entirely predictable.) When two elements are in complementary distribution in linguistics, we normally think of them as variants of the same basic category. For example, when two sounds in phonology are in complementary distribution, we say they are allophones of the same phoneme. We might extend this analysis to parts of speech: There is one “supercategory” labeled “A” that has two subcategories in it (allo-parts-of-speech, if you will): Adj and Adv. In this book we’ll stick with the traditional Adj and Adv categories, simply because they are familiar to most people. But you should keep in mind that the category A (including both adjectives and adverbs) might provide a better analysis and might be better motivated scientifically.